


a-hunting we will go

by trash_rendar



Category: Final Fantasy IX
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-08 03:04:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20290426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_rendar/pseuds/trash_rendar
Summary: Of festivals and flowers and particularly problematic Zaghnols.





	a-hunting we will go

This year’s Zaghnol is a hulking behemoth, even among Zaghnol.

Thick rounds of muscle bulge out of its frame, stretching its skin almost to the point of tearing. Its hide is pocked and scarred from prods and whips, tally marks of a hundred bouts against the beast handlers in the rearing pens of Lindblum. Its twin horns and double-twinned tusks twist and curl wickedly out from its head like plumes of faraway smoke or devil horns. Its mouth is a jagged forest of razor-sharp teeth. Its hooves, each easily the size of a man’s torso, shake the Business District with every step. The city couldn’t ask for a better centerpiece to the Festival of the Hunt, and the Zaghnol almost seems to know it - it shoulders its way through the rest of the competition, making mincemeat out of hunter and hunted alike, beady eyes blazing with single-minded animal bloodlust.

It’s a brute. It’s a beast. It’s the unquestioned star of this year’s show.

And it’s charging right at Vivi.

The little Black Mage jumps out of the way just in the nick of time. He’s not quite as little as the last time he was in this position, but compared to the Zaghnol, he’s still puny. Being in the Festival again, in the thick of it this time, and up against its star monster, is making a little seed of anxiety sprout in the core of his being. Not the usual sort, the sort that made your legs lock up and your hands shake – the kind he’d had when he was smaller and less sure of himself and not at all used to fighting – he’d outgrown that kind long ago. But there’s more than one kind of worry, and this is a flavor Vivi isn’t used to. He’s afraid of losing, not injury.

He’s trailing in the leaderboards, he knows (at least, he’s pretty sure he is, anyway). If he wants to win, he needs to claim the 99 points on the Zaghnol’s head. And he wants to win. _Badly_.

The prize he has in mind is worth any risk. At least, he thinks it will be.

He supposes he’ll find out one way or the other.

The Zaghnol is swinging around, shaking its jowls and roaring, meaning to make a proper fight of it; as it heaves to, Vivi spools the energy within him, sends it flowing down his arm and out his staff towards the foe. The Fira spell detonates exactly where he wants it to, but the beast shakes it off like it’s so much flash and smoke.

It’s coming at him again, now. It tries for an impaling lunge with its lower tusks. He sidesteps, falls back a few paces, and lifts his staff to repay it in kind. “Thundara!”, he shouts as he unleashes the spell; lightning crackles across the beast’s leathery hide and fills the air with a ghastly burning smell, but does little else. Vivi gulps and wonders what the beastkeepers must feed their creatures to make them so tough.

The Zaghnol lunges. It’s using the tusks on her chin the way Freya would use her pike - thrusting, puncturing, ripping and tearing. Vivi dodges backwards and can only hold his staff aloft for a moment before he has to dodge again. On the third thrust, the edge of the beast’s horn shreds the blue fabric of his jacket; the fourth time, the beast aims lower, trying to strike at his legs. Luckily, it just misses the kneecap, but the mage trips over his own feet as he backpedals, tumbling to the ground. The Zaghnol rewards the misstep by scooping Vivi up in its horns, shoveling him up into the air with a roar.

When Vivi comes bodily to earth, his staff goes one way and his hat goes another. On instinct, he retrieves his hat first, pulling its brim down over his ringing ears and crawling to his feet. He tries three times for the rod before his groping fingers finally find it. The Festival commentator is saying something over the city’s loudspeakers, but he can’t really make out the words – and the prowling Zaghnol is more important, anyway. It’s sizing him up, now, judging how exactly it should charge in and gore its opponent – or, perhaps, strutting for the crowd like a prizefighter. Either way, the lull gives Vivi time to catch his breath.

It had been easier to take on the bigger monsters with his friends by his side, he thinks, not for the first time today. Fighting alone, there’s nobody else to rely on to control the beast – or protect him from enemies too aggressive to let him properly charge a cast. It doesn’t help that he’s been somewhat out of practice, what with the end of the Mist crisis and all.

The Zaghnol snorts and glowers, stamping the ground. It’ll charge again, and very soon.

Vivi almost expects Zidane to fly in from nowhere, cutting away at the beast with a wink and a smirk, the kind that always convinced the Black Mage everything would be okay in spite of it all… but – no. The monster is already bearing down upon him. He squeezes his eyes shut and braces for the inevitable.

So much for making Master Hunter.

The impact, when it comes, is much softer than he’s expecting; in fact, he finds he’s still standing as the Zaghnol barrels away down the street, trumpeting furiously. When Vivi opens his eyes, there’s a rain of green sparkles glittering in the air around him, the sound of a flute carries on the wind, and Carbuncle is wheeling through the sky around him. Seeing such serenity following such chaos renders him speechless.

“Don’t just stand there, dummy! Wake up, already!”

Curaga is still tingling through his body as Eiko skids to a stop in front of him. She’s changed so much already, even though so little time has passed (it has only been a little while, hasn’t it? The months blur together for Vivi lately). She still acts like a kid, but she’s always had the look of a grown-up, and she seems to have managed that curious feat of growing older that Vivi never could. He notices she’s still wearing the same hairbow, though it’s fraying; and the same wings, though they’re battered and worn. But then, Vivi is still wearing the same hat and jacket, so he supposes he has no room to comment.

She gives him a smirk that could almost be a smile, and Vivi thinks about how much they’ve changed, and how much they’ve stayed the same.

“Eiko!” he says, before he can stop himself. “I-I forgot you were competing, too,” he appends in a half-audible mumble.

“You forgot? How?” She’s about to laugh, but something to her left grabs her attention. She bolts forward, grabs his hand, and pulls him out of the path of the Zaghnol before it can bowl them both over again. “Jeez! How many times am I gonna save your butt today?!”

“S-sorry—”

“It’s fine,” she barks. “I’m gonna bring out Fenrir – you soften it up with your magic, okay?”

“B-but Eiko – I thought the Festival…!?”

“Don’t worry – I’m still gonna win!” she replies, cheeky as ever. Her Eidolon appears in a burst of light, and they bound together after the Zaghnol with an ethereal snarl and a tucket of flutesong.

Vivi settles into the back rank like the old days and watches as Fenrir tears at the beast with fang and tooth and lashing winds. The assault makes the lumbering brute stagger and backpedal; for the first time, the Zaghnol is on the defensive. He almost thinks it’s down for the count, but – impossibly – it stirs again, and rises with eyes filled with animal hate.

Even Eiko seems surprised to see it survive. “Vivi…! Cast something big!”

_Something big_, Vivi thinks, and immediately begins talking himself down. He’s been holding back all tournament. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the hunters, he reasons, if he dominated the field with his high-level magics. And though he wants to win – badly – there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The Zaghnol is on the ropes anyway, after all – but then again, it’s really, really tough. Maybe Flare will take it down? What if it doesn’t? What if it only does not quite enough damage – could Eiko kill it then? Would he be okay with that? What was her prize gonna be, anyway?...

It’s on these matters, among others, that Vivi’s mind is turning when he at last notices the Zaghnol shift its attention to Eiko, baring its teeth and tensing its muscles for one last murderous charge. The sight simplifies matters considerably.

Trance, like Meteor, comes to him easily.

* * *

“…Well,” Regent Cid says, later. “Though I’m tempted to remind our hunters of our unspoken rule to show _restraint_ during the festivities…”

Vivi busies himself with studying the floor under his boots and tries to the chilly stares from the rest of the competition.

“…There can be no doubt about this year’s Master Hunter. Congratulations, Master Vivi!”

There’s a smattering of applause as Vivi approaches the foot of the Grand Castle throne. Some of the clapping is genuine. Some is compulsory. He can’t quite figure out what kind Eiko’s is; she’s standing over by Lady Hilda Garde, and her face is like a statue’s. She’s gotten very good at suppressing her emotions and acting like a ‘proper’ princess – that is, she’s good at it when she _wants_ to be.

Cid lays a fatherly hand on the mage’s shoulder as they turn to face the rest of the room. “And of course, the arrangements for your reward have already been taken care of,” he adds, a smile curling the ends of his moustache. “It’ll be waiting for you up on the observation point whenever you’re ready.”

“Right,” the Black Mage nods. He’s grateful Cid is letting him move at his own pace – getting his prize in front of everybody else would be a little overwhelming, and he has something to do first anyway. “A-and thank you, sir.”

Cid gives him a wink and taps the side of his nose. “Just be sure to be back by sundown. And – try not to spend too much time around Tantalus, will you? It’s not that I don’t trust Baku, but he’s not the best influence on a child, you know…”

Vivi giggles, and agrees. Quite by accident, he meets Eiko’s gaze from across the room, and gulps.

He _really_ hopes this works.

* * *

He didn’t bring much gil to Lindblum to spend on gifts (_dummy_, hindsight tells him, in a voice not unlike Eiko’s), but there’s a flower girl hawking her wares in the Business District after the post-Hunt cleanup. She’s sweet like the scents of her wares, and she helps him pick out a bundle of Alexandrian roses and zinnias and a bunch of other blossoms he doesn’t know the name of. He presses a handful of coins into her palm as he thanks her profusely, then scurries back towards the Grand Castle. (He stumbles only twice on the way, and doesn’t fall once.)

The castle lift rises to the upper level, but it feels like he’s left his stomach on the lower floor. Luckily, he’s used to managing this kind of nervousness – it feels a lot like the normal kind, only amplified by the high stakes of the situation (how far they’ve all come, to be thinking of interactions that happen everyday among normal people as ‘high stakes’ again, after all they’ve seen and done!)

It doesn’t seem so scary now, now that everything is inexorably in motion, so he doesn’t mind so much. But he can’t help but clutch the bouquet a little tighter as he makes the remainder of the climb up to the castle parapet.

The Regent is as good as his word. Eiko is waiting by the telescope, and looks supremely bored; she’s fiddling with her friendship ribbon and looking out over the city, watching aircabs flit hither and thither around their larger brethren. She’s about to lift her flute to her lips and play a little ditty when Vivi clears his throat at the foot of the outlook.

“Um.” He fumbles with the flowers and tries to will the words to come. They don't. “I, uh...”

He stops when he sees Eiko’s face – there’s dawning comprehension mixed with her own bratty haughtiness, and he’s not sure where to go with it. While he’s standing there mutely, she stomps over and gives him a slug in the arm. “You _blockhead_!”, she cries indignantly.

“Wh— Me?!”

“Yes, you! You stole my idea!”

“I… I did?”

Eiko nods sharply and crosses her arms. “Garnet once told me that Zidane tried to win her affections by winning the Festival of the Hunt. It’s an incredibly romantic gesture,” she explains, tactfully omitting the part where her fellow princess seemed to be more bemused by it than anything else. “I was gonna do the same thing. And then you had to ruin it by winning instead – and now you’re stealing my idea!”

“Technically, aren’t we’re both stealing Zidane’s idea, then?” interjects Vivi.

“No!...” Eiko thinks for a moment, then smirks smugly. “I stole it first.”

“…How can you steal it first if I was there when the Festival was happening?”

“You didn’t decide to steal it _then_,” she replies. “But _I_ did when I heard the story. Checkmate.”

Vivi whines. He’s about to concede the point when something occurs to him. “…But… Zidane’s not here this year. So… who were you trying to win for?”

Eiko looks like she’s been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “…Nnnnobody…”, she lies, poorly. “I mean - …T-this year was just practice,” she insists primly, cheeks reddening as Vivi cocks his head. “For when he’s watching. _Obviously_.”

“Uh huh... A-anyway, these are for you,” he says, presenting the bouquet.

She takes the offering with unusual gentleness. A gust of wind sets her bow fluttering and makes Vivi screw his hat down tighter on his head. It scatters the smell of the flowers around the pavilion, coloring the air with their assortment of sweet scents. For a moment, they both seem to bask in how they both fit into the same roles they had when they were still adventuring across the world’s four continents, despite the time that’s passed since then. How they’ve both stayed the same despite it all.

Then Eiko says, bossy as ever, “I know - let’s go play down with the guys at Tantalus!”

And Vivi says, shy like always, “C-Cid says they’re a bad influence…”

“Too late! I’ve already decided. Race you there, slowpoke!”

“B-but I won the Hunt…!”

They scurry towards the Theater District, trailing gardenia petals and laughter, and relish in the simple joy of being children together.


End file.
